Posts Tagged ‘Nazis’

One of Jordan Peterson’s core ideas is the human capacity for evil, and his great examples are the crimes of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and Communist China.

What’s notable about all three, he wrote, is not just the atrocities committed by the ruling party, but that the regimes were sustained by the consent of ordinary people.

Under certain circumstances, Peterson believes, almost all of us are potential secret police informers and concentration camp guards.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

His heroes are people such as Viktor Frankl, the Viennese psychiatrist who found a meaning in life to sustain him in a Nazi death camp; Vaclav Havel, who lived in truth despite his frequent imprisonments in Communist Czechoslovakia; and, above all, the great Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who survived Soviet forced-labor camps and found a way to tell the world about them.

Havel condemned those who went along with the regime, such as the greengrocer who put up a sign saying “workers of the world, unite” because doing so is a path of least resistance. Solzhenitsyn went so far as to blame himself for helping make the Gulag possible by failing to contract the Soviet regime’s lying propaganda.

So the choice is stark. Either be willing to say “no,” no matter what the cost, or be a potential cog in a killing machine.

What is it today to which we need to say “no”?

It is whether to go along with unprovoked military aggression, assassinations, preventive detention, torture of suspects, warrantless surveillance and all the other practices of police states—all of which have come to be accepted as normal.

Ordinary Americans let themselves be led, step-by-step, to committing atrocities such as the My Lai massacre or the Abu Ghraib tortures. Until more of us learn to say “no”, we will be just like ordinary Germans in the book Peterson discusses in the video above.

Timothy Snyder, a historian of the Hitler-Stalin era, has written an eloquent and heartfelt little book—On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century—warning that democracy could perish in the United States of today just as it did in Europe in the 1930s.

Just as no couple making love for the last time ever realize it is the last time, he wrote, so no person voting in a free election for the last time realizes it is the last time.

On Tyranny contains 20 timeless principles for defenders of democracy. The principles are illustrated by ominous stories of how the mass of people failed to resist Nazi and Communist tyranny and inspirational stories of how a few did.

Then come claims that Vladimir Putin is like Hitler and Stalin and that Donald Trump is like all three, and a call to be ready to resist.

Snyder has done well to remind Americans of the fundamental principles of democracy and the need to defend them.

But the need for the reminder didn’t originate with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. As Glenn Greenwald, Conor Friedersdorf and others have warned, these dangers have existed since enactment of the USA Patriot Act in 2001, and before.

During the Bush and Obama administrations, the government has claimed the power to engage in acts of war, order assassinations, spy on citizens, and bypass due process of law and also to imprison anyone who reveals what is going on. Until this changes, every President is a potential tyrant, not just Donald Trump.

People who talk like that have forgotten, or maybe never knew, just what Hitler and the Nazis stood for and what they attempted to do.

Over the weekend, I read an article about Hitler by the historian Timothy Snyder and an interview with Snyder about his new book, Black Earth, which made clear just how distinctively evil Hitler was.

Hitler was a racist who believed, literally, that Germans had no more in common with inferior races such as the Slavs than they did with animals.

He thought Germans had a right and duty to kill off members of inferior races to reduce their population and make room for Germans, and to treat the survivors as work animals.

The slaughter of World War Two and the death camps were only a foretaste of what would have happened if the Nazis had won.

As Snyder wrote, Hitler thought that, literally, nothing mattered but the biological struggle for survival between different races. There are racists, like Harper Lee’s fictional Atticus Finch, who believe that some races are inherently superior, but that the superior race should treat inferiors with justice and kindness provided they “know their place”.

Hitler would have none of this. He thought kindness toward the weak was a fatal weakness in the struggle for existence. He saw the world as overpopulated, and believed Germans could create living space for themselves only by slaughtering the inhabitants of eastern Europe and taking their land..

Nations and governments were of little importance in Hitler’s mind. Ultimate reality for him was the racial struggle for existence.

Given the purges and starvation imposed on Ukraine by Stalin, it is not surprising that many Ukrainians welcomed the invading Germans as liberators in 1941. But they soon learned better.

Wikipedia says the Nazis killed 17 million people, including 6 million Jews and 11 million others, mostly Slavs.

Between 1941 and 1945, approximately 3 million Ukrainian and other gentile victims were killed as part of Nazi extermination policies in the territory of modern Ukraine.

More Ukrainians were killed fighting the Wehrmacht than American, British, and French soldiers combined.

Original plans of genocide called for the extermination of 65 percent of the nation’s 23.2 million Ukrainians, with the remainder of inhabitants to be treated as slaves. Over 2 million Ukrainians were deported to Germany for slave labor.

In ten years’ time, the plan effectively called for the extermination, expulsion, Germanization or enslavement of most or all Ukrainians.

The picture above shows members of the Azov battalion of the Ukrainian army. Notice whose portrait is being held up. Andriy Biletsky, the commander of the Azov battalion, has been quoted as follows.

From the mass of individuals must arise the Nation; and from weak modern man, Superman… The historic mission of our Nation in this watershed century is to lead the White Races of the world in the final crusade for their survival: a crusade against semite-led sub-humanity… The task of the present generation is to create a Third Empire — Great Ukraine… If we are strong, we take what is ours by right and even more; we will build a Superpower-Empire…

I hope and believe Azov is unrepresentative of a majority of Ukrainians, not to mention the Russians, Tatars, Jews, Poles and other ethnic groups in Ukraine.

But the present Ukrainian government accepts Azov’s display of Nazi symbols. The Ukraine, along with the USA and Canada, were the only countries to vote against a United Nations resolution condemning the glorification of Naziism.

There are neo-Nazis in the Russian Federation who’ve murdered Central Asian immigrants. There have even been neo-Nazi skinheads in Israel some years back, among Russian immigrants whose Jewish identity evidently wasn’t strong. There are neo-Nazis in other countries, too. But there are no neo-Nazis in countries other than Ukraine, that I know of, with official acceptance.

Maybe one reason why Naziism is acceptable among a segment of Ukrainians is that the old Soviet Union treated Naziism as a kind of benchmark of evil, and Ukrainians understandably felt that whatever the Communists said must be the opposite of the truth.

Many people around the world have embraced fascism because they think it is the opposite of Communism, and vice versa.

Nazi is an abbreviation for “National Socialist” which is a short form of “National Socialist German Workers Party,” but they were not, in fact, a left-wing or socialist party under any reasonable definition.

The Nazis were opponents of free enterprise. They did not believe in the unregulated free market. But they were not opponents of capitalism. The capitalists did very well under the Nazi regime.

Source: The Wages of Destruction, by Adam Tooze. Click to enlarge

I have read The Wages of Destruction, and it refutes the notion that Hitler was a madman — evil, yes, but not without reasons for what he did. Hitler’s idea was that Germany could be a great nation only if it had access to resources equal to the great continental nations, the United States and Soviet Russia, or the great overseas empires, Britain and France.

To accomplish this, after coming to power in 1933, he planned to conquer and depopulate Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia in order to create “living space” for the Germans. Ukrainians and Poles were starved so that the German population could be fed. Even Hitler’s anti-Semitism, even though it didn’t have an economic motive, served an economic purpose. Confiscation of Jewish property helped to finance the Nazi regime.

This chart shows that, in Germany under Hitler, holders of financial assets received about a third of the national income, while in the United States under the New Deal, they received less than one-fourth. Piketty’s statistics only go through 1938, but the German capitalists did very well in the early days of the war, when they were able to buy up property and companies in conquered countries at bargain rates.

Of course in the end the Hitler regime ended disastrously for everybody, including the Nazis themselves. Germany later achieved prosperity and a dominant position in Europe in the way it always could have done — but developing its industry and its human resources.

The Hitler and Stalin regimes were both one-party dictatorships exercising absolute power, and both were among history’s greatest mass killers. But instead of being regarded as two examples of the same thing, they have been regarded as opposite extremes, both in their time and the present.

The explanation is in the charts. Under Lenin and Stalin, capitalist wealth was confiscated. Under Mussolini and Hitler, the capitalists lost their power, but continued to enjoy their incomes and affluent ways of life. That is the difference.

Since the word “fascism” is being bandied about fairly loosely, I recommend these articles by John Michael Greer of Cumberland, Md., for anyone who is interested in the historic definitions of fascism and national socialism.

I read somewhere — I can’t verify the fact, but I believe it – that Stalin banned the use of the word “Nazi.” The Communists instead referred to “fascists” and “Hitlerites” because the term “national socialism” might invite comparisons with the Soviet regime.

I have a couple of minor quibbles with Greer. He is correct in saying that the Nazis were not conservatives, and that German conservatives were not comfortable with them. But it also is true that the German business owners were allowed to continue enjoying their profits while German labor leaders went to concentration camps.

The reason that most of the internal opposition to the Nazis came from conservatives was that the socialists and Communists were in concentration camps. That is not because the Nazis were in fact conservative, but they needed a functioning army and functioning industry and needed (temporarily) the existing Army officers and industrialists.

His last article is a scenario in which a Hitler could arise in the United States, as a populist reaction to the failure of the U.S. government instead of (as happened in Spain, Chile and Argentina) a counter-revolution imposed from above.

I don’t think his scenario is impossible. I don’t think the United States can continue as it is, but change is not necessarily for the better.

I think Greer neglects the degree in which the existing U.S. national security apparatus is made to order for a Hitler. But, as I said, these are minor quibbles. His articles are a good review of the historical background and meanings of the words “fascist” and “national socialist”.